Case study: powering crude oil market intelligence with AI
September 2025•Bigdata.com team
How one of the world’s largest commodity traders cut discovery times from hours to minutes with Bigdata.com.
A global trader struggling with information overload
One of the world’s largest commodity trading firms—operating in 35+ countries and generating over $256B in annual revenue—needed a sharper way to monitor the crude oil markets.
Its crude oil desk, active in both physical and derivatives markets, faced the constant challenge of tracking market-moving events: geopolitical tensions, refinery outages, and supply chain disruptions. Traditional monitoring tools were too slow, too generic, and unable to measure the real market significance of emerging narratives.
Transforming market monitoring with the Bigdata.com API
To solve this, the firm built an AI-driven workflow with the Bigdata.com API at its core. This enabled traders to:
- Master industry terminology – Accurately capture and interpret highly specific oil and energy language.
- Access real-time intelligence – Retrieve relevant global news in minutes, not hours.
- Organize by themes – Structure large datasets into coherent market narratives.
- Score impact – Quantify the novelty, trendiness, and price impact of each emerging topic.
Incoming news was automatically verified, filtered, and clustered using LLM-based topic modeling. Daily reports were fully customizable and ranked by trader-set priorities, with every insight traceable back to its Bigdata.com source.
Delivering measurable results for traders
The crude oil desk quickly saw significant improvements in its workflows:
- Faster intelligence cycles – Topic discovery times dropped from hours to minutes.
- Sharper focus – Traders received only high-confidence, market-relevant themes.
- Greater transparency – Every signal linked directly to verified, original sources.
Towards a cross-commodity future
While the first deployment focused on crude oil, the firm designed the architecture for expansion. Next steps include:
- Extending coverage to natural gas, LNG, and refined products.
- Tracking cross-commodity narratives for macro-driven strategies.
- Developing fully automated, agent-driven monitors that can alert, summarize, and recommend actions in real time.
Bigdata.com turns information overload into actionable intelligence, giving traders speed, accuracy, and clarity in high-stakes markets.